1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a novel tantalum compound, a method of producing the compound, and a material comprising the compound as an effective component for forming tantalum oxide films.
This tantalum compound is useful for forming an insulating film having a high dielectric constant (hereinafter, referred to as a high dielectric insulating film) in a form of tantalum oxide during a process of manufacturing semiconductor devices.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Tantalum oxide films are the focus of interests and attention as a high dielectric insulating film used for manufacturing semiconductor devices such as very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) memories such as dynamic random-access memories (DRAMs) with a storage capacity of 64 M or larger per chip.
The tantalum film of the type described may be formed by means of chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in which alkoxytantalum such as pentaethoxytantalum is decomposed thermally and a decomposition product thereof is deposited on a substrate.
However, in order to uniformly feed pentaethoxytantalum to a CVD device, the feeding should be carried out at an elevated temperature or at a higher degree of depressurization due to the low vapor pressure of pentaethoxytantalum and undesirable troubles, such as deterioration of components of a feeding system due to such a high temperature feeding, may arise.